Associate Director, Data Science

Who We Are

Horizon Media, founded in 1989 by Bill Koenigsberg, is recognized as one of the most innovative marketing and advertising firms. We are headquartered in New York City, with offices in Los Angeles and Toronto. A leader in driving business solutions for marketers, Horizon is known for its highly personal approach to client service. Renowned for its culture, Horizon is consistently named to prestigious annual Best Places to Work lists published by Fortune, AdAge, Crain’s New York Business, and Los Angeles Business Journal. Together we are building a place of belonging. We value diverse perspectives and strive for an environment where employees feel welcomed, safe, and empowered.

What Is blu.

blu. is Horizon’s omni‑marketing capability powered by a Connected Marketing Platform built in‑house. The foundation is an Identity Framework, partnered with TransUnion, whose PII data functions as our identity spine. By integrating deterministic data assets from agency partners, blu. attaches 11,000+ attributes to bridge the gap between martech and adtech, delivering a true 360‑consumer view. It enables brands to engage customers across all journeys and offers proprietary insight tools that enhance profiles with psychographic attributes. This platform underpins our solutions and services across strategy, planning, activation, measurement, and optimization.

Job Summary

The Associate Director, Marketing Sciences sits at the center of data, media, and brand strategy. As a day‑to‑day contributor on client teams, the role focuses on generating insights to inform audience strategy for planning and performance analysis while campaigns are in flight. Responsibilities include working with big data, applying advanced statistics and machine learning, and designing client‑facing solutions that influence Horizon’s data strategy and product direction. The position requires cross‑functional collaboration with Client Architects and related teams, strong communication skills, and an ability to manage client accounts and data sources within the blu. platform.

Responsibilities

• Product Innovation & Management (15%) – Operate as a product innovator and power user to improve analysis and results supported by AI. Maintain and support product development, ensure scalable design principles, manage release processes, define features and models, provide proofs of concept, and incorporate enhancements into the blu+ product.
• Solutions Design & Innovation (40%) – Leverage blu. structured and unstructured data for transformations, insight generation, and audience performance analysis. Join audiences, media exposure, and conversion events to build feedback loops. Create models to estimate contribution of attributes driving conversion, validate models during audience building, assess duplication and incrementality by channel or tactic, extract user‑level data for new audiences, and query databases for exposure events to manage media frequency. Develop new modeling and analysis techniques, integrating AI solutions where appropriate.
• Technical & Analytical Excellence (40%) – Apply advanced knowledge of dimensions and metrics across people, behavior, and media datasets. Understand relationships across datasets, data dictionaries, and structured taxonomies. Demonstrate expertise in machine learning, supervised and unsupervised methods, ETL, EDA, and big data complexities.
• Leadership & Team Management (5%) – Partner collaboratively with business stakeholders, participate in daily stand‑ups, meet delivery commitments, proactively identify issues and blockers, coordinate with Client Architects and Data Solutions, provide input for team training, and support development needs.

Qualifications

• B.S./B.A. in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a related field (required).
• Advanced statistics (a plus).
• 3+ years relevant experience, preferably in media, marketing, or digital advertising.
• Knowledge of big data mining routines (essential).
• Expert in SQL and Python or R (essential).
• Familiarity with GitHub (a plus).
• Machine learning experience (a plus).
• Understanding of data technology integrations across sources and ecosystems, and ability to troubleshoot.
• Experience with digital analytics and audience insights reporting (Campaign Manager, GA, Adobe, GA360) – a plus.
• Ability to work independently in a fast‑paced, multi‑project environment with minimal supervision.
• Team player with excellent organizational, communication, and interpersonal skills.

Salary and Benefits

Salary Range: $125,000.00 – $165,000.00 (actual base salary may vary based on skill set, experience, education, and qualifications). Benefits include a discretionary bonus, health insurance, life and disability insurance, retirement savings plans, company‑paid holidays, unlimited paid time off, mental health and wellness resources, pet insurance, childcare resources, identity theft insurance, fertility assistance programs, and fitness reimbursement.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Horizon Media is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.